Lotte Mitchell Reford

Lotte Mitchell Reford is usually a poet, but currently working on nonfiction about sickness, language learning, loneliness, and starving medieval saints. Lotte holds an MFA from Virginia Tech and they currently live Mexico City. Their writing has been published in, amongst other places, Copper Nickel, Spam, Poetry Bus, and Hobart Pulp. Their first pamphlet was published in 2021 by Broken Sleep Books. Lotte won CRAFT’s 2023 nonfiction prize and was nominated for a Pushcart for the same.

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

Weekend Witness

(cw: mention of dead babies)

On Sunday I walk around a flea market with a man I don’t much like yet. We point. We say what things are as if that’s conversation, like, weird chair and, Look, tiny bread and cool, knives and, is that what a credenza is. I don’t want this new man to buy anything in front of me. I am worried he will have bad taste and that somehow I will catch it. I can’t buy anything in front of him because I am worried I have bad taste and he will be able to tell. Look, I say, at that pile of puppets. I point at a big pile of puppets. I wonder what I am giving away with my unfurled finger, chewed cuticle, the little moon scar across my top knuckle. The puppets are tumbling over one another, faded wooden marionettes. Where their paint is peeling the grain is going to seed. To fur. To feather. They look soft. They are dressed like tiny men and women in a tiny Shakespeare play. Yesterday, while I was trying to eat lunch, there was this dead baby on my phone. He looked like a doll – big eyes totally still and painted on, body wrapped in a cartoon cocoon. The dead baby looked like this painting of Jesus I saw once on the wall of an Orthodox church in the Balkans, painted by someone with a weak understanding of perspective. The wrong size, the wrong color, stiff and terrifying. But somehow the puppets don’t look like the dead at all. They don’t look like felled bodies on the battlefield or in the street. They are on strings and the strings are twisted together and they are nothing like knotted hair. The puppets are like carrots in the back corner of the crisper, curling into themselves. The man doesn’t look at the puppets. He doesn’t hear me saying what they are. He is across the road already, eyeing WWII memorabilia. He is looking at (I think) a thick metal medal stamped with an eagle. This doesn’t matter. Look! I say to myself, A tray of eyes. The eyes are blue, heavily lashed. They blink at me from the tray. They are waiting to find a home in a face. Look I say Look! As if anyone can hear me. Look! I say as if there is any other option at all.

Self-Portrait as endless rotation

(cw: self-destructive sex)

You begin to bleed just outside his house –
your womb clenching like a fist, maybe
to rid you of last night and the long hours
of not sleeping and his snoring, the way you felt
like after all those free drinks you should come
home with him, and he wouldn’t stop
telling you about his life. Anecdotes
you won’t forget. He had a bit part
on Outlander, opened a door for a king.
And that you were beautiful. He told you
again and again that you were beautiful.
But you just wanted it over and done,
thought it would be quick work then sleep
but he wanted to take you in his arms and hold
you close and press his skin to your crawling
skin. Your own fault of course. Walking
past the park you can feel blood trickling
down your leg, descending the ladders
of your tights, and you let it, a marker
of being the stupid girl you are. And the whole
time the park railings are inescapable.
Caught in the corner of your eye.
Light dark light dark light dark light.
When you were small, you asked for a zoetrope
for your birthday. When it came, there was a woman
stuck inside. She went round and round and
round and round in her bloomers. You kept spinning
the thing hoping that soon she would escape.
That she would change course, walk out, move on,
and leave your window to her boredom empty.
When you get home, you realize you left your watch
(vintage, a gift) on his bedside table.